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Florida voters conflicted over Zika-fighting mosquitoes
You can't just go and release genetically-modified mosquitoes into the environment without making sure people are okay with it -- regardless of how badly we need a way to eradicate the Zika virus. In Tuesday's election, 65 percent of Florida residents in the city of Key Haven voted against a ballot measure that'd sanction such a test, according to MIT Technology Review. Meanwhile, some 58 percent of voters in the county that Key Haven is a part of, Monroe County, voted in favor of the test. Now it's up to the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District Board of Commissioners (FKMCDBC) to make a decision.
Gene-modded mosquitoes will fight Dengue Fever in Brazil
The Brazilian city of Piracicaba has a potent new weapon in the ongoing fight against Dengue Fever, which infects more than a million people annually: genetically modified mosquito lotharios Created by Oxitec of Abingdon, UK and bred locally within Brazil, these GM mosquitoes (all of which are male) are designed to crash the local population before they can spread the tropical disease. More than six million have been released throughout Piracicaba since April. When a GM male mates with a wild female, his sapper genetics cause the resulting larvae to die before they can reach adulthood. What's more, the larvae also carry a genetic mutation that causes them to glow red under UV light, giving researchers an easy way to identify them on sight. "It gives an instant readout of how successfully you're driving down the native population," Hadyn Parry, chief executive of Oxitec, told New Scientist.
Mosquitoes bred with suicide genes to combat disease
With the World Cup just six weeks away, Brazilian authorities have approved the widespread, commercial release of a strain of mosquito that has been genetically reprogrammed to wipe out its own species. These Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are a major carrier of dengue fever, and bed nets are useless against them because they bite during the day. While some have experimented with using lasers and other techniques to mass-kill the disease-carrying bugs, Brazil's preferred solution begins in the lab: Male mosquitoes are given a deliberately flawed gene and then released into the wild so that they can reproduce, at which point the implanted gene rears its head and causes any offspring to die before they reach sexual maturity.
